LAWYERS TO FILE APPEAL OF LOCKERBIE VERDICT

The Libyan intelligence agent convicted of 270 counts of murder for blowing up a Pan American jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 told the Scottish courts Wednesday that he wished to appeal.

Lawyers for the agent, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, filed a notice in the Justiciary Office in Edinburgh that they would appeal his Jan. 31 conviction. They have six weeks to file a statement describing their grounds.

The right of appeal is not automatic in Scottish courts. That statement will be submitted to a High Court judge in a process called "the sift." If that judge grants permission for the appeal to go ahead, a panel of at least five High Court judges will be convened to hear it.

The High Court has 15 judges, and four of them -- the three judges and an alternate empaneled as jurors especially for this unusual trial -- heard the case and cannot be part of any appeal.

A spokesman for the Scottish Executive said Wednesday that unless al-Megrahi waived his right to be present, the appeal would be heard in Camp Zeist, Netherlands, where he is jailed and which was the site of the trial.

On Wednesday, a lawyer who has acted for al-Megrahi said the agent has gone on hunger strike.

"I have been told by the defense team that he has started a hunger strike," Stephen Mitchell told Reuters in London.

"But the defense team and the doctors are trying to dissuade him and tell him the right course is to pursue his appeal," said Mitchell, one of the lawyers who was originally part of the agent's defense team and met al-Megrahi in Libya in 1991.

"He is very depressed," said Mitchell, who has kept in contact with al-Megrahi's present legal team. "I do worry for his mental state."

Al-Megrahi was found guilty by a unanimous vote of three judges and given the mandatory sentence of life in prison. The court recommended that he not be eligible for parole for at least 20 years. His codefendant, Lamen Khalifah Fhimah, was unanimously found not guilty and freed the same day.

The life sentence, set by law, cannot be appealed.

A murder conviction in Scotland can be appealed if new evidence comes to light or if there was "miscarriage of justice" at the trial, said Clare Connelly, director of a University of Glasgow Law School team that watched the Lockerbie trial. She declined to speculate about what grounds al-Megrahi's lawyers would choose.

Al-Megrahi is to stay at Camp Zeist, where he has been held since surrendering in April 1999, until the legal process is exhausted.

A cell dubbed the "Gaddafi Cafe" -- after Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi -- has been prepared for him in Scotland's biggest prison, Barlinnie jail in Glasgow.

Mitchell said: "I think he is probably very, very depressed. I don't doubt for a minute that he thought there was no evidence against him. Back in 1992 he made it clear to me he was ready to go for trial outside Libya."

Robert Black, a professor at the University of Edinburgh who also followed the trial and said he was "absolutely astounded" at the conviction, recently posted an article on his Web site, www.law.ed.ac.uk/staff/rblack.asp, outlining flaws that he found in the written reasons that the judges gave. Such thinking might form the basis of an appeal.

He noted that the judges had concluded that al-Megrahi must have bought the clothing found around the bomb. But, Black said, the owner of the clothing store had simply said al-Megrahi "resembled a lot" the buyer and described the customer as 6 feet tall and older than 50. Al-Megrahi was 5 feet 8 inches and 36.

He also said the judges had concluded that the bomb must have started its journey in Malta, even though the evidence suggested that there was no unaccompanied bag on the flight that the prosecution says the bomb took from Malta to Frankfurt, Germany. Black said the judges concluded that the origins of a fragment of a circuit board for the bomb timer had been treated differently by detectives than other circuit board fragments had, but that the detectives had nonetheless accepted that as evidence.

For such reasons, Black called the conviction "unsafe and unsatisfactory."